MOBILE, Alabama – At 9 p.m. on Christmas, Tom and Nancy Garson of Washington, D.C., booked a room at the Battle House for a trip to coastal Alabama to research Tom’s family tree.

“At midnight, my husband came in and said, ‘Nancy, there was just a tornado in Mobile. Nothing may be standing,’” said Nancy Garson.

Fortunately, what the Garsons sought – records from the archives at Springhill Avenue Temple – were intact, but the collection was being boxed up this week to go to a more protected site while the temple undergoes repairs for damage to its roof, windows and HVAC system.

The Garsons still made the trip a week later to look into records on the Proskauer family. Archivist Susan Thomas had set aside a folder of information when temple volunteers packaged up 125 boxes of records dating back to the formation of the Sha’arai Shomayim congregation in 1844.

The Garsons were able to gather information about Adolph P. Proskauer, who was one of the few Jewish officers in the Confederate army and a community leader in Mobile before moving to St. Louis, Mo. The Proskauers existed several generations back in Tom’s family.

Arranged on the temple’s stage Friday were boxes of old bulletins from the 1800s, Bibles, prayer books and copies of birth, death and marriage records -- usually kept in two small storage rooms behind the temple's social hall. Nearby, portraits from the temple walls were enclosed in bubble wrap, including one of Israel Jones, the temple’s first president, by the painter Nicola Marschall.

“This would probably be one of my most valuable items,” said Thomas. “We have minutes from board meetings from back then. We have some personal correspondence from people, some journals, photographs, family histories, some old Bibles.

“Historically, that stuff can’t be replaced.”

Employees from SERVEPRO were stacking the boxes on dollies, hauling them to a truck parked on the temple’s grounds, where trees had been stripped bare by the Christmas Day tornado.

Thomas said she gets an average of two to three requests for information a month, mostly from out of town. Trained in social work and communications, but with experience in managing archives at the University of South Alabama, she took over the job from the late Robert Zietz several years ago.

“It’s kind of like doing forensics. You look at all these records and piece together who the family members were,” Thomas said. “Sometimes you don’t get a match, but other times you do, and when you do, it’s kind of a neat thing when you can tell a family, ‘Yeah, I’ve discovered that these are your relatives.’”

The Garsons spent a few hours going over the records before heading to Tallahassee, Fla., to continue their trip. The archives, meanwhile, were headed to climate-controlled storage on St. Louis Street downtown.

“I am impressed that the board was willing to go to this much length to preserve our history and not let anything happen to it,” Thomas said. “That means a lot to me because it shows they do have a strong concern about keeping the historic items for future generations.”